Scotland temporarily ran entirely on wind power as turbines generated over 200 percent of national electricity demand.

[Emrys]

28. This is now getting tiresome. I didn't realize a good news story about Scotland would bring on the nuclear fanboys.

Tidal stream installations don't have to "trash" coastal evironments. These I'm talking about are turbines anchored to the sea bed.

Nuclear power plants don't do much for seascapes either. And all your "technical solutions" won't save diddly squat if that once-in-100-year storm, that may soon be happening much more often if insurance company research pans out, overwhelms the seaside site and its operators and undermines or washes away the infrastructure. Electricty and water don't mix happily.

You can cook up any number of technoschemes to try to pump shit into a nuke, but it will have to discharge it later, warmer and no doubt more fragrant. London notoriously already has to recycle effluent to supply drinking water, so there's not that much to spare in our largest conurbation and energy consumer and the Home Counties that surround it.

I had to laugh when you tried to lecture me about pumped storage schemes. The most extensive network of them in the UK runs within a few miles of where I live and incorporates a large number of lochs and hills in the west of Scotland, which we can still fish and climb. I mentioned them earlier, so you might have guessed I'm familiar with the technology.

One reason the UK turned away from nukes was because they proved less economical than had been promised. We've also had some unpleasant experiences with, among others, an installation called Dounreay, which you can Google if you've never heard of it, a grand mess that will take generations to deal with and probably never be properly cleaned up as horrors due to appalling historic waste mismanagement keep being discovered, and Windscale, which you can also Google if you're not familiar with the name, which children of my generation had no choice but to know about, to the extent that the government eventually changed its name.

On a relatively small archipelago, we're a bit sensitive to that sort of thing for some reason.

What you do in California is far enough away not to be a major concern for me, so I don't understand why our windfarms are such a negative concern for you. I suggested above that you do what you want and we'll do what we want, as we're doing.

Read up about the European Marine Energy Centre and associated projects in the Orkneys if you want to be better informed and maybe stop talking nonsense about "trashing coastal environments":

https://www.oref.co.uk/orkneys-energy/wave-tide/

https://www.emec.org.uk/facilities/tidal-test-site/

https://www.orbitalmarine.com/westray-tidal-energy-project/

https://tethys.pnnl.gov/project-sites/orbital-marine-power-o2-emec

https://www.hydrogenscotland.com/orkney-completes-world-first-tidal-to-hydrogen-integration/

https://www.orbitalmarine.com/o2-power-generation/